In Defense of the AR-15 Cult :: 03/27/2021

A s the macabre spectacle of mass shootings returns to America at the end of our pandemic, Matthew Walther argues that the problem is the cult of the AR-15. “The United States should ban the manufacture of these weapons and related accessories designed to make them more lethal,” writes the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic journal, “and severely restrict ownership of those already in circulation, beginning with a voluntary gun-buyback program.”

The occasion for this is the mass shooting in Boulder, Colo., allegedly by Ahmad al-Issa. The shooter used an AR-15 and killed ten people. For Walther, AR-15s are “dangerous toys” unlike the firearms carried by his hunter father or the pistol used by his mother-in-law in need of self-defense. In a counterintuitive way, he argues precisely because millions of AR-15 owners are law-abiding, banning the gun is a “no-brainer” because “no one’s hobby matters more than another person’s life.” Its only imaginable use, for Walther, is terror and insurrection.

Like Walther, I find the number of violent gun deaths in America appalling and embarrassing. And I agree with him that guns of stunning lethality are too often in the hands of unsteady men. But, we have to be clear. Ahmad al-Issa was not a member of the AR-15 cult. AR-15s are not used in the majority of gun crimes or even in mass shootings. The mass shooter in Atlanta earlier this month killed eight people with a pistol. Banning AR-15s would not have an appreciable effect on gun deaths. And if one does want to stop violence done with AR-15s, the answer is not to abolish the cult of the AR-15, but to get more AR-15 owners into it. On inspection it’s one of the healthiest parts of gun culture. It’s precisely the “cult” that makes it a culture, that is, a place where people can grow and be held accountable.

The AR-15 is not even a single gun, but a kind of firearm platform. AR-15s often can (and often are) configured in such a way that they aren’t lethal enough for deer hunting. They can be optimized for various home-defense scenarios by being made shorter, and outfitted with quieter calibers of ammunition. They can be configured for long-range target competition. The accessories, gear, or simple features that are held to make AR-15s more deadly or that qualify it as an “assault weapon” are accessories, gear, and features that often make the gun itself safer to fire anywhere. Those are features like a pistol grip, or the shroud that covers a hot rifle barrel. In New York, the lethality of a banned AR-15 “assault weapon” may be no different or significantly less than the Ruger Mini-14, another semiautomatic rifle, but without a pistol grip. But the Mini-14 can be perfectly legal in New York.

New York’s anti-assault-weapons legislation forbids large magazines under the somewhat plausible theory that a mass shooter can inflict more damage by quickly spraying a large magazine and reloading another one. But mass shooters rarely do this. The Boulder shooter may not have even reloaded, and in the horrifying videos, he fires methodically and slowly. Other mass killers such as those at Columbine High School did the same. They too used pistols, shotguns, a carbine, and bombs.

Walther cites some embarrassing ad copy as evidence of the AR-15 cult corrupting its adherents. That there is much gimcrack and embarrassing hype around the AR-15 is not surprising. This is America, and people are trying to sell you things. Ad copy about the Ford F-150 truck, or Dolce & Gabbana cologne, or garage floor tiles is just as silly and embarrassing to cite to people who buy these things. People sell lawn-care products with promises that you will “dominate” your neighbors.

The AR-15’s versatility and adaptability has made it the rifle of America’s militia, which is nothing more or less than America’s responsible gun owners. It is within the AR-15 cult that gun owners are likeliest to get the best education in gun safety, the best training for being a responsible gun owner at home, traveling, or on a range. It’s there that they may get the best understanding of where the gun fits into America’s tradition of republicanism. A country of determined men who have arms like the AR-15, or even significantly less-capable rifles, is almost impossible to rule without consent. Just take a look over at Afghanistan.

Attempting to ban the AR-15 will just mean that the ad copy is written for Ruger Mini-14s, or for Shockwave-style shotguns. The space in magazines and message boards that are vacated of the AR-15 will fill up with something else, and suddenly we’ll fret about the “cult of Glocks” or the “cult of the SIG Sauer P365” when those are used in mass shootings. They already are used in them.

The dangerous gun owners are the ones who don’t make their gun ownership an occasion for socializing and interacting with other gun owners. It is the loners and paranoiacs. Or the people who inherit a gun and never learn how to use it, or buy a handgun during a period when they feel in danger, but then forget about it until they’ve fallen into a dangerous depression. America’s gun laws are an outlier; that is true. So are the laws and norms that prevent the mentally ill from getting the interventions and supervision they need.

The Second Amendment’s protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, but its reference to a militia  does indeed point to the social nature of arms ownership. We should want gun owners to join their local ranges, to meet people from their message boards in real life  and build each other up in institutions devoted to the mastery of their weapons and themselves. Ahmad al-Issa wasn’t warped by a cult; he was self-radicalized. A community of AR-15 enthusiasts, if they had met him, may well have red-flagged him under Colorado’s existing laws.

And besides, if it is the devoted enthusiasm the AR-15 generates that bothers you, just watch what happens when you do ban it.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online. @michaelbd

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/03/in-defense-of-the-ar-15-cult/